Career Development

May 25, 2014

We can see it’s coming. The future of work in the next five years will be so different from the last 50 years. There are more than a few driving forces behind this: demographic shift, lifestyles of millennial, technology, organization design, nature of competition, and human capital flow etc. Management of the workplace used to be quite simple. All one has to manage are:

What is the direction in terms of how work is being performed?

What tools are needed to support the work?

How much effort is needed to achieve the desired goals?

How much persistence should be applied to get better results?

What incentives are in place to motivate the individuals to achieve those goals?

Our work pattern is changing. You can no longer distinguish between the Travel-Worker pattern and Wherever-Worker pattern or the Whenever-Worker pattern. And there is the Whoever-Worker which is adding new challenges. These Work-Pattern Personas are not mutually exclusive and many traditional incentives won’t work for them. Actually, many of the incentives we use today make companies worse off. They encourage more short-termism as well as each optimizing for their own good rather than the company’s whole, which ends up in more politics and a lack of collaboration.

The best incentives are the intrinsic ones. These self-generated factors (self-responsibility, freedom to be creative, develop unique skills and abilities, interesting and challenging work, opportunities for advancement) all have a deeper and longer-term effect than monetary incentives. I guess for the millennial, the most effective extrinsic motivator is title. They just can’t wait to lead even though they are far from ready. It is like taking on a new PS4 game at the advanced difficulty for the first time and getting killed in 3 seconds. Intrinsic motivation is powerful. It comes from a person’s internal desire to be something…. to do something…. to make a dent in the universe. They are their own dream-makers. They are the best people you can find.So what would be the communication and collaboration technologies needed for the future workplace? This is purely anecdotal but we do have a lot of research in this area, which I can’t share. The emerging needs for a worker is not being more productive, as most are very productive already and with these little devices that we carry around, we are all working 24/7 (at least myself). Here are a few ideas:

Idea Mapping Networks. As the knowledge workplace is more reliant on creative ideas and often innovative new ideas rebuilt on top of each other. The future workplace will have a solution to map the origin of ideas and link them to those who improvise on them while not losing sight of the sources and the associated mental models that it derived from. This 3D visualization will link all important documents and work performed and will be the starting point of any creative brainstorming session.

Blue Collar Special Forces Central Comand System. Blue-collar field workers are often less motivated and often see their job is meaningless. Taking a page from the special forces and using augmented reality technologies (virtual glasses and dual-comm bone conduction headsets etc.) will not only improve their ability to handle onsite problems but make them feel they are part of a special forces that they are out there solving complicated problems. They can act and feel more professional, working and talking to the command center with people who support them to perform their tasks.

Emotional Management Systems. Emotional management in the workplace is often a performance issue. This is often too personal for your colleagues or even managers to deal with. If it is taken care by technology that is a different story, because the system won’t judge you. They are there to help. With biosensors to monitor your level of stress and frustrations, perhaps they can activate some breakers to help you to cool off. Marily Henner was right she said “Being in control of your life and having realistic expectations about your day-to-day challenges are the keys to stress management, which is perhaps the most important ingredient to living a happy, healthy and rewarding life”.

Virtual Work Bench. Imagine a share desk that a team can work together on even when they’re in different offices. It takes the idea of a share bench (desktop) further and allows sharing and real time editing of moving of documents or any objects. It is available when people are assigned to a team and you can always switch back to your private desk with a wipe gesture. Imagine one real-time synchronized virtual desk.

I have a few more but I have to get back to my day job. I realized I have not written a blog post for almost two months (probably the longest since I started this blog 7 years ago). I was jetting around the world running meetings with 3 hours of sleep every day and often I almost forget where I'm at. Sometimes I woke up ending up at our Shanghai, London, San Francisco or Mexico offices. Here you go, another unmet need for the new workplace – please tell me where I am at now.

November 18, 2013

The party at Idea Couture London office last week was a fantastic event. Get to meet many young talented people there and looking forward to work with them on projects. My work takes me around the world and it is hard to get to know everyone in different offices. I enjoy talking to creative people from creative engineers to designers. And I have a very different idea of what "creative" people means. Idea Couture is a creative powerhose and it is creativity in the deepest and most systematic sense, looking at challenges from new perspectives but achor in a highly logical manner. That's our creative algorithm and it is rooted in every IC office.

Design educators take note. Design schools have built up an expectation that they can equip students to tackle complex problems through the power of creativity alone. They can’t. They don’t. And they continue to fool themselves with four big myths about creativity.

The first myth is that creativity and design are inseparable. Here, we have led ourselves down a garden path of consensus where many of us believe that because designers are designers they are creative. But design is not creativity manifested, and creativity is not the exclusive to the design mind. One can be creative without having any design skills or sensibility, and there are many skilled designers who utterly lack in creativity. Design doesn't = creatiivty. It needs creativity.

The second myth is that analytical people are generally not creative people. Here, in subscribing to the popular oversimplification of human complexity that there are right-brain thinkers and left-brain thinkers, we assume that those of us who lean towards analysis, process, logic and science are – admit it – a little uninspired. As anyone who understands what goes into big and small leaps of science knows, this is rubbish. The analytic and the creative can, and often do, live side by side in the same brain.

The third myth is that, when it comes to design, creativity must be unbound from the laws, structures and processes of the day-to-day world. Bound up in the long-standing mythology of the artist as a visionary or hero who must be free to do what he/she – and he/she alone – does best, this can sometimes be little more than an excuse for the fact that the artist or visionary lacks the ability to apply his creativity beyond his own imagination. Nowhere is this more prevalent than at the intersection of business and design where many creative people prove themselves incapable or unwilling to grasp (and design for) the realities of what a company does and how it operates.

The fourth and final myth is that which surrounds the recent and very popular theme of ‘design for social change’. While the output of many such projects is little more than a poster and a campaign, not an actual solution, most of us would agree that such work starts with the best of intentions. Here, as in the third myth, the challenge is that designers are generally not educationally or experientially equipped to identify the social or cultural genesis of a problem and are typically blind-sided by the economics of an issue. The result is that many develop ideas (not really solutions) that are irrelevant, unsustainable and, in some cases, lead to further problems. They were one minute inspiration and not sustainable change.

If I was to start a design school (not sure I would) from scratch tomorrow, the program would be based on Movement, Intuition, Structure and Complexity. These would be the “subjects” that would become the permanent vocabulary of every graduating student for one simple reason: we need to train a new breed of professionals that can live up to the promise of how design can change the world. Only by balancing the ‘general’ with the ‘specific’, the ‘whole’ with the ‘part’, the ‘abstract’ with the ‘concrete’, and the ‘indefinite’ with the ‘definite’ can we prepare young people for the increasingly competitive job market, the stakes of what it means to be a citizen of design in the global community, and the what it means to be a human being who enjoys deeper forms of beauty, meaning and purpose while understanding economics.

October 26, 2013

Sometimes I wonder how much progress we’ve actually made over the last 50 years. In Saudi Arabia, women are still not allowed to drive along with many other things. Today, a group of Saudi women have taken to the streets in their cars on a day of collective protest against the ban on female drivers. I am sure they will be getting threats of all kinds and if we’re talking about human rights let's start with this. There were about 17,000 people who signed a petition calling for women to be allowed to drive.

Still, many companies do not understand the importance and benefit of normalizing the workplace for LGBT beyond just offering workplace protection. Protection is one thing, but realizing the power of true diversity is another and creating a diverse, inclusive workforce where we can bring people from all backgrounds together produces a dynamic workplace and actually helps with innovation. Despite how open we think the world is, we’re still living in a very conservative world while technologies are racing us forward and bringing more open-mindedness and thereby widening the gap.
Innovation is the core of organization competitiveness and gone are the days when corporations had their workforce that looked the same, trained the same, dressed the same, worked the same, spoke the same language and was predominantly of the same gender (usually male) and lifestyle. No wonder it is hard for them to innovate.

Any homogeneous corporations will not survive the shock that organizations are experiencing. The most basic not-so-secret formula for building an innovation culture is pretty simple - embrace diversity and start to attract, retain and promote a diverse workforce that looks differently, works differently, dress differently, speaks differently and is inclusive of the full spectrum of human sexual orientation and gender identities. Do this before you start hiring consultants and rethinking your innovation process, there is no process that works without true diversity.

In fact, there is a very close correlation between diversity and innovation. Senior executives and employees alike are recognizing that a diverse set of experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds is crucial to innovation and the development of new ideas in and outside the workplace. All great companies of the future embrace true diversity, not just a policy to satisfy the public, but truly and deeply believe that diversity is the key for the future and the survival of organizations. When Tim Cook stepped into the role of Apple CEO in Aug 2011, the appointment earned him the unofficial title of “the most powerful gay executive in the world.” That move alone convinced me Apple gets it.

“It is never too late to give up your prejudices” ― Henry David Thoreau. I don't thing we are working hard enough. Perhaps someone should design an app to deal with prejudices.

April 21, 2013

This has been a very tough two months for me in terms of time and I have not been spending much time writing my blog as much as I used to. It is getting a bit difficult to find the time as we were going through a reorganization, adding new offices, putting new management system in place and at the same time trying to finish my two books on the weekends which will be published in May and Oct this year.

I am excited about my new Design Thinking and Strategic Innovation book that I hope to fill a gap in the market place. And management of the company is taking more and more of my time. So the time I can afford to touch projects is shrinking, I think I only spend 25-30% on projects these days instead of 40%. And people think I spend a lot of time on my MISC magazine, the reality is it is less than 2% of my time. I have a great team helping me with that. I only pick the theme, cover girl and the designs.

We have always designed Idea Couture to be a company that is agile, high style and deserve great love. But we recognize this is an ambitious goal because we want style, speed and substance. Not everyone can make it. I remember someone said something like "Out of difficulties and impossibilities grow miracles." Perhaps we’re naïve. Idea Couture is not a place for small thinkers or people with big egos. It is place for people who believe in being AWESOME and won’t spend time fighting for excuses.

I take pride of seeing people that I mentor growing everyday.
We’ve come a long way since launching what we called an innovation firm – whatever that means. It is not a design firm with MBAs; or management consulting firms with some designers or digital agencies calling themselves innovation agencies. We are built from the ground up to do what we’re supposed to do – we work with organizations to uncover innovative ideas that sustainably grow market share or create new markets through powerful customer experiences innovation. We are close to the completion of our reorganization and I am very excited to wait for more new people joining us every week.

Our technology team is amazing and we’re now adapting new methodologies so we can deliver better and faster cross-platform solutions. Our strategy team is growing and growing and have so much untapped potential (unsolicited resumes are flying in dozens everyday).

Our design team is world class and I personally make sure they will remain the best all the time. They not only produce great work, but also open minded and egoless, and fun. At Idea Couture, design is at our very core, not the surface. Design here is under transformation and it is not done within a studio, it is done in the real world in future tense. Design is where technology and art breakeven and where love and logic intersects.

Our insight team is AWESOME with all capital and it is our intellectual powerhouse. When the company advanced forward to a new stage, our foresight capability was not meeting the standard that I required both in terms of strategic knowledge and professionalism. So we needed a full upgrade. Now we have a new global team and a plan to fully integrate that into our innovation process.

We have no time for amateurism. People are committed to giving their best. We just launched our idea couture culture page, which is my personal most favorite part of our site that best represents us. It shows us who we are as individuals which really what this company is all about. People are here for a reason, not for a job. They find their best and it is our job to bring out their bests. It is not always easy. It is how they find meanings. There is a strong correlation between job satisfaction and meaning.

We refuse to act like a "grown-up" company; however at times the company and will always want to think we’re small even though we have 6 offices around the world.

We refuse to act like a “think tank" as we don’t just think, we do.We don't just produce report, we ation on them. We use visual output for sensemaking and mobilizing change that increases organization adaptability and agility.

We refuse to act like we "know it all" but we believe we are equipped to find the best available solutions.

We refuse to accept any "best practices" as we are the one who invent “next practices”.

We refuse to accept that “amateur foresights” is better than no foresights. Actually it is better to have no foresights than wasting time on amateur futurists.

We refuse to accept that "ideas are everything", in fact ideas don’t worth much. They are cheap. There are no shortage of people with ideas and can never execute anything. The art of jump starting innovation is strategic commitment and it is more valuable because nothing happens until someone do something.

We refuse to accept people with "big egos", it is simply not part of our culture. But there is one nice thing about egotists is that they don’t talk and think about other people at all.

Idea Couture is a working prototype and will remain a working prototype in time to come.

March 02, 2013

You want to be more creative? Sometimes it is not about trying
harder to act creative. I see a lot of people trying too hard. Sometimes it’s not just about giving one the space to be
creative. Sometimes it is just being
strategic. And sometimes it means apply a healthy dosage of common sense.

Strategic creativity
is more valuable than creativity.
Not everyone needs to be “creative” the same way as other think you
should be “creative”. It is not about ideas. It is an attitude. Everyone can
live a creative life and be creative how he/she sees live.
It seems that when creative people (artist) with certain carft try to solve a problem or achieve a certain end result, particularly when the goal is related to their craft or specialized skills, they have an advantage. But when the problem is too big for them, it takes strategic creativity on a more sophisticated level.

Creativity is in such demand today and it is not the years of schooling or what art schools you attend. The word “Creatives” is used in advertising world to describe
those who work on creating advertising campaign or providing craft for
production. People in these roles
like to believe that they are more creative than others. It is not the case at all.

Creativity is not a job title,
crafts, capability or skills. Creativity is state of mind, which you can use in
everything you see and do. People should live a creative life rather being creative. By
living a creative life and having that state of mind, one naturally becomes
creative. Creative is independent of discipline, culture and tools.

So how do you live a creative life?
Here are three specific ways that can help you to live a creative life.

Be Bipolar. A little madness yield great artists, designers,
inventors and scientists. The evidence is growing for a significant link
between bipolar disorder and creative temperament and achievements. Seeing the
extremes of both sides of anything help you to understand the spectrum of
choices and options. Go to places
you don’t normally go and use that space. It is not available for everyone.

Be Foolish. Be lazy. Everywhere people are telling you
rules and the right ways to do things.
Be acting silly and even lazy can sometimes help you to see easy paths
to complex problems. Agatha Christie wrote, “I don't think necessity is the
mother of invention. Invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly
also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.”

Be Strategic. Most people see this as the opposite of
creative. This is total rubbish. Being strategic can also be creative. And
being strategic you need to be very creative. The best strategists are often
most creative people who can apply creativity in the context of a specific
problem. They don’t’ dress in a funny way or even trying to act like artists.
They may wear suits and even a tie, but they could also be the super creative types.

Creativity is not just about “aha” moments or interesting ways to look
at things. Creativity is about putting empathy to work. Creativity is not about
perfection. Weisberg and Csikszentmihalyi both talked the importance of motivation in creative performance. A notion of Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of creative flow is that reaching peak performance is “autotelic”, meaning it is enjoyable for its own sake. So the ‘creative person’ is simply someone who enjoys creativity and therefore does it all the time, even with no reasons and gains nothing from it. Someone just want to be creative all the time. That's different from peope who are strategic in applying creativity. Nothing good of bad. Just two very diffferent creative types.

Creativity
is not about opening new doors because something said creativity people have no
doors and doors are for those without imagination.

September 25, 2011

This has been a very crazy week between meetings, conference calls with London, Mexico City, Shanghai, Seoul and Paris, magazine deadline and cover shoot, staff party, a number of other social events, and London Business School's worldwide alumni celebration took place last Thur in over 80 cities, and it was great to catch up with many familiar faces.

The next issue of M/I/S/C is the big "Creativity" issue - the magazine is doing so well and it is putting some pressure to keep up the quality. I started them magazine in a few weeks and operate it on a "zero planning" basis - meaning I do not have an editorial calendar, or editorial meetings and everything is sponstaneous. Scary thought for some. I was wondering what should I do about the cover last Monday. Decided to use a dancer instead of a model for the cover on Tuesday. Picked up the phone and called a dance school the same day and talked to Karen Duplise of Ryerson Theatre School (Performance Dance Degree Program) and went in for a quick casting the next day. Studio booked and shooting session scheduled on Thurs. Friday was for picture selection. I am pretty happy with it. You have to wait 10 weeks to see the next cover. Here's a peek.

Dance is like design, the question is always about how much art (the craft) and how much creativity. Celebrity choreographer Twyla Tharp choreographed Push Comes To Shove (1976) which featured Mikhail Baryshnikov and is now thought to be the best example of the crossover ballet. The crossover was a perfect example of creativity in a highly disciplined art.

Tharp has written a book about creativity - The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. In the book she shared what she has learned about creativity and how those lessons apply to anyone with creative impulses. She believes that creativity is not a gift from the gods, but rather the product of preparation and effort. Some truth here but not sure I torally agreed with that.

Like to share a reprint of my interview with London Business School Alum News on new thinking that is crucial to innovation, first apprared in LBS Alumni News and then LBS IMPACT.

What do you see as your impact on the world? My LBS degree was my second graduate business degree. I was able to have the luxury to put more focus on the quality of the learning in one specific subject area rather than multiple foundation components. I was excited about learning from inspiring teachers such as Sumantra Ghoshal, Tom Stopford, Jules Goddard and many others. They inspired me to think about deep management and leadership and helped me to realise the difference between good managerial practices influenced by bad management theories and good management theories applied through bad managerial practices.

Business and government leaders are experiencing a profound crisis of trust and even legitimacy and that has triggered a loss of confidence in traditional ways of ‘managing’. The very core of many management theories is being questioned and ‘management’ is close to, if not passed, the point of failure. My mission is to help Fortune 500 companies make sense of what’s going on and to rethink, re-imagine and reorganise for a future of unprecedented uncertainties and opportunities through applied design thinking. I operate at the intersection of design thinking, competitive strategy and organisational change.

What indelible mark do you want to leave on the world? As a side project, I publish a design thinking and innovation magazine called M/I/S/C/ (Movement/Intuition/Structure/Complexity), the idea came to me when I was in Milan trying to decide what magazine I wanted to read on the plane. I really wanted one about innovation and change but the ones on the shelf were not hitting the mark. So I decided to start one. It is doing amazingly well selling in over 22 countries. Now we’re doing a Spanish edition as well as an iPad edition. I hope it can take on a life of its own and leave a mark by inspiring future managers and business thinkers.

What is the greatest lesson you’ve learnt?I learnt that it is very important to embrace failure. I should have failed more and more often when I was younger. But unfortunately people did not encourage ‘embracing Failure’. I didn’t take many risks and I played it very safe with every project I started. I did everything I could to make it work because failure was seen something that holds you back. I know now that you learn more when you fail often. Trying to avoid failure only prevents growth but once you alleviate that fear many more opportunities present themselves to you. Slowly, ‘failure’ is starting to gain acceptance and it will make future professionals much stronger and wiser.

What was your biggest mistake? Not listening to my intuition. It’s difficult to trust yourself when everyone and everything around you is telling you something different. Trusting your gut is one of the most important things you can learn. Also, not leveraging the opportunities that come with any crisis. Every situation presents obstacles but also opportunities – you just have to look for them.

What is the next step for you? I’m very excited about helping companies power into the future through design thinking. It is the reason I go to work (or the airport) every morning. Our company started as an experiment and is now fast becoming the most talked about innovation firm. The next step is to secure a global presence and build the next generation of leaders that will propel our growth. The future is exciting.

February 15, 2011

The picture above is the Valentine's Day cupcakes Sarah Yoon (an IC designer) designed and produced, limied edition and no photoshop. Yum. I am happy to discover that many of our folks have talents outside their work and formal training. One guy makes bowtie and another one makes coasters. I think it is important that people should possess an artistic craft outside of Adobe CS5 and Power Point.

As the Harvard B-School’s MBA class of 2010 celebrated their graduation outside Baker’s Library last summer, they were listening to speech by John W. Coleman (also a member of the grauating class and getting a joint degree from the Kennedy School). Lots of talk around the need to think outside the box and be creative. I always wonder how much more creative you can become before and after B-schools.

I think generally speaking people are less creative post B-schools as they pick up more management concpets. “As we cross the stage tomorrow and step out into the world beyond this school, what if it’s more important than ever to recapture that child-like sense of imagination?” Coleman said. “What if, in a world so vastly transformed by crisis that it barely resembles the one we left in 2008, what matters most is not Excel proficiency or accounting acumen, but a passion and capacity for creativity?” It is very true, the question remains what do you need to do? May be start with cupcakes.

Not many B-schools, if any, treat business creativity seriously (let alone they understand what it means). Even No.1 schools (three years in a row) like London Business School, there are nothing in the curriculum that teaches students to be creative. What they have is a Centre for Creative Business, a not-for-profit joint venture between London Business School and University of the Arts London, which exists to educate and equip creative industry (TV, music, arts and film etc.) management teams, that’s very different from applying creativity in everyday managerial capacity.

In today hyper-competitive cut-throat business environment, creativity in business is really the most important capability. I am interested to know how many MBA and other Master programs are teaching the personal AND professional tools of creativity and methods for applied creativity in problem solving? Telling students to think outside the box is one thing, being able to teach them how to think outside the box but within a bigger box is the art – we all work with constrains. This is where design thinking comes into play.

The second biggest challenge is teaching them to be creative but also a good team worker. Creative people are generally speaking not good team worker. I get pissed every time people try to tell me “I come up with the idea!” and I wished I have taped the session and play them back where the idea actually came from. Being creative AND collaborative is another big bridge to cross.

And the third one, B-school profs struggle to understand creativity, let alone teach them. There is no point sceamibng out-of-the-box thinking and then talking about compliances and accounting policies. I am 100% sure that we can teach creativity (which I've done for decades), once you get slightly above an average I.Q. and a resonably interesting person (I cannot help you if you are a super boring person, there may be a medication for that but I am not sure). I can teach you applied design thinking. Intelligence and creativity are not directly correlated. So you could be a genius and display little creativity or have fairly average intelligence and wield artistic talent and amazing creative powers.

Creativity is a learned behavior. I can teach and train people to be creative. But I cannot teach style and taste. Buying a Chanel cupcake doesn't mean you appreaciate one. That’s a different post another day.

A creative manager needs to have the courage to try new things and risk failure and understand calculated failure. It is like understanding there is a chance your parachute will not open and have a spare one. The not-so-strategic creative types will end up dropping from the sky without a parachute, the strategic creatives know how to handle risks and also understand the risk/reward relationships. They are not interested in doing crazy thing with no reward or knowing the reward is not big enough. These strategic creative people are innovators.

January 22, 2011

“If you’ve never been lost you’ll never end up getting anywhere new”. That was a great opening line when Dan Widen tried to sum up his observations on day one of the event. It was the first time I met him in person and I must say I really like him. Not only of his achievement but his personal style of reflections. Also met with his colleague John Jay, also a great guy and honestly I was a little surprised to see them at the event, a nice surprise. I was expecting to meet with only scientists, artists and policy makers.

The STEM to STEAM workshop was hosted by RISD and funded by the National Science Foundation, the idea is to bring together thought leaders to come together to develop strategies for enhancing STEM education through the integration of Art and Design thinking. "STEM to STEAM pedagogy integrates a broad range of learning methods and learning ecologies from the empirical studies in the science lab, constructive critique in the design studio and creative discoveries in informal learning settings," according to Dr. Pamela L. Jennings, Program Director, Computer and Information Science and Engineering, National Science Foundation. "Creativity and rigor are rewarded and STEM learning in formal and informal settings is transformed from 'we have to learn' to 'we want to learn'."

On my flight home, I was thinking, what is the difference between an artist and a scientist? Or the artistic process and scientific progress? This was the closing discussion we’re having on the second day of STEAM. It is never easy to have scientists and artists (I don’t know which group I belong to, I am a management scientist and an artist) sitting together to talk about the integration of art and science. There is no question that there were differences in opinions in terms of what’s the definition of an artist?

The commonalities seems to be that both requires extreme curiosity, certain expertise, experimentation and ability to deal with unknowns, and using various methods of inquiries etc. And the key differences the science progress requires validation and repeatability (other wise it is not a science experiment). On the other hand art can often be done as a one off. Art is more process oriented and science has more consideration for the outcome or goal-oriented (there are also a lot of science research that I don’t know what they’re trying to achieve). The process (may be process is not the right word) of art requires artists to deploy observational skill which allows them to see beyond the surface, recognize what the eye sees and interpreting them as they see it, and constantly experimenting with organizing colors, textures, patterns, shapes, space and form.

Artist is best in asking question and sometimes these questions seem to be irrelevant they are trying to make a point. And when art is applied in science, it is becoming part of the scientific process, it is a powerful subjective aid in enriching the objective world of scientific evidence. But when science is applied in art, suddenly it has become the “rapid prototyping of truth.” Instead of algebra equations and statistical charts or applying Multivariate Statistical Process Control when several related variables are of interest are collectively known, we can make a powerful piece of visual that brings all the data together added with a subjective richness to help viewers to see things otherwise they may not see. Art is like Viagra for science (or even for scientists) to help them to keep up with the crazy world out there.

Another interesting idea is for several decades, investigations into consciousness has always been a muddy area in the scientific community. Artists and designers have always believed that art can impact our phenomenological experience of the world - via our central nervous system - through artistic stimuli, which thrill, question and captivate, for centuries. The sensations from art, whether it comes from an art installation, a painting or a digital simulation can help us to experience the immediacy of the things happing (whether it is 50 years ago or now around us) and provide a truly phenomenological experience of our world. And thereby open a T1 connection into our consciousness.

I know a scientist/artist that uses her knowledge gained in biology to explore relationships between cellular form and function and she was showing people amazing visuals of how the double helix structure is telling us what makes us who we are – an example of science meets arts. When art infuses into science opens up possibilities for artists that have the scientific knowhow to use scientific knowledge to create works of art.

I must say I very much enjoyed the event and I had the opportunity to meet with lots of scientists and artists and a lot of great discussions about the value of crossing over. Art and science provide a complementary way of making sense of the every increasing complex challenge around us, it allows data to have emotion and help us to see (and sense) the past and future. A healthy dose of subjective enlightment can give scientific knowledge a richness and depth beyond that which our senses can perceive. They complement each other in sense-making which is really the comprehension of meanings, and projection of our future. And science cannot do it alone without art.

December 16, 2010

This is the Idea Couture year three Christmas Party and probably the best one so far, without the live performance of an Indian classical group performing like the previous year but we have a DJ/designer Victor who took over as Chief Music Officer for the party.

Everyone was having a great time and I saw a lot of happy people. It is my number one performance metric for business performance, happy people = better work = more creativity = high performance. I don’t think they teach this formula in MBA schools or it happened when I was asleep in class.

I am very grateful that IC has the created a great culture. I picked the right people and they come from all walks of life and have one common goal – human potential. I promised myself long time ago that I would never hire someone whom I think has no potential and do not have a chance to be the best of the best. And some takes a little longer and that's ok.

For me, the best is not good enough; I want the best also the fast. Some think I am asking for too much, I ask for the same for myself. If I can do it, they can do it. I’ve pushed people to the edge and bounced back stronger than ever and I am proud of the people I mentored. I am also very quick to get rid of those that don’t meet the standard; I have no time to waste. I want to look back one day and say here is a long list of names of people that I’ve helped to fully developed their true potentials.

It is a chicken and egg thing – happy people first or happy work first? Happy people who have a better chance to find happy work because they follow their hearts. Or happy people just happen to find jobs that are surrounded by happy people or pick a happy boss. Or a company that has a happy culture attracts happy people? I don’t know exactly what comes first.

The finding from a study published this year in the Journal of Occupational and Psychology conducted by Assistant Professor Nathan Bowling of Wright State University with colleagues Kevin Eschleman and Qiang Wang undertook a meta-analysis on the results of 223 studies carried out between 1967 and 2008. All of the studies had investigated some combination of job satisfaction and life satisfaction. People who are unhappy in life are unlikely to find satisfaction at work, anything new here?

Their studies assessed factors at two time points so to better understand the causal links between job satisfaction and life satisfaction. If people are satisfied at work, does this mean they will be more satisfied and happier in life overall? Or is the causal effect the opposite way around?" The causal link between subjective well being and subsequent levels of job satisfaction was found to be stronger than the link between job satisfaction and subsequent levels of subjective well-being. "These results suggest that if people are, or are predisposed to be, happy and satisfied in life generally, then they will be likely to be happy and satisfied in their work," said Nathan Bowling.

Incentive systems only work to certain extend and it is far less powerful than creating a ‘happy’ culture. There is no productivity in an unhappy environment not to mention innovation. The single most efficient way to increase your productivity is to be happy at work. No glorified job titles, fancy corner offices, systems, incentives or methodologies in the world can beat the productivity and creative boost you get from really, really enjoying your work and surrounded by really really smart and funny people. May be business school needs to start teaching how people can be funny and strategic?

December 13, 2010

I was listening to John Seely Brown’s presentation last week in SF on his ideas about the future of learning and education. He is extremely well respected, now retired and a visiting scholar at the USC. His view of the world is very tech bias naturally as a scientist, struggling a bit in terms of understanding the world of large organizations’ behavior and decision-making. He was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of the famous Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) for many years, it is worth a debate whether PARC was worth the investments from Xerox’s perspective but nevertheless it was a place where the smartest people worked on the coolest projects that still influencing us in our everyday life.

His perspectives on education is probably more interesting that his ideas on business. His ideas of learning mainly evolve around social learning, not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in a field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into a community of practice. He put a lot of emphasis on tacit learning and use examples such as the studio system in architecture represents a good example of social learning under the guidance of an established practitioner. In this system, students work together in a common space and peripherally participate in each other’s design process; hence they can benefit from their instructors’ comments on and critiques of other students’ projects and not just from comments on their own work. This sounds exactly like how we work at Idea Couture.

Clients often put an over-emphasis on the processes and transfer of explicit knowledge in the innovation process and neglect or avoid dealing with tacit learning and sensemaking. It is the opposite of what business schools teach and many find themselves uncomfortable dealing with what they perceived as unknowns. Those are not exactly unknowns, may be uncodified and unstructured.

Dreaming up scenarios and sensemaking of these scenarios are often the toughest part. Seeing bits and pieces of data and the ability to connect them together to develop visible “data maps” of what are making sense around us, it is the learning organization at work and often requires some degree of personal transformations or basic shifts in how we think, frame and interpret.

As Edwards Deming says, nothing happens without "personal transformation." And at IC, we’re trying hard to provide a safe space to allow for this transformation as a social learning community. Everyone is encourage to dream, but also asked to anchor themselves on the reality of business dynamics and competitive forces. In additional to imagining, we use design thinking and system thinking to avoid the quick-fix mentality that makes us "system blind."

Think about it, many of today's problems come from yesterdays what were considered creative solutions, and many of today's creative solutions will become tomorrow's wicked problems. The most perplexing thing is that many quick fixes are being implemented by snart people even though no one actually believes they address underlying problems or they work at all. But we still feel compelled to implement these "solutions" just to show progress.

Hey a bad decision is a bad decision, whether it takes a second or a month to make that decision. We need to learn to apply design thinking and sensemaking as part of our everyday life decisions approach and learn to use unstructured data to enhance human decisions rather than automate them. The mortgage crisis is partially due to the automation of calling the loans even though it may not be necessary. On that note, next month we will have training sessions on strategic framing and sensemaking for our folks ... design thinking at work.

October 03, 2010

We wanted our San Francisco office to be a community space as much as a creative and functional workspace, and yet all material used will need be sustainable. Our San Francisco office renovation began with a commitment to create an airy, energy-efficient and healthy environment even when we have to look across the world to find the righ solution.

We purposely chose a convenient location so people can easily ride their bicycles to work. And it is a 5-minute walk to the waterfront. Office furniture is a difficult place to start as has the most environmental impact. 90% of office furniture out there is plain ugly. These desks and chairs can do more damage to the environment than just using up energy and natural resources when they’re manufactured. They can also introduce toxic chemicals into the environment, both during their manufacturing process and after their disposal. We wanted something that is highly sustainable.

We also need creative and flexible space that supports ‘explorative’ and ‘coordinative’ activities amongst our multi-disciplinary designers. The space design has to communicate and inspire creativity. Designers like keeping rough sketches, magazine clippings, pictures, design models and other relevant things on their working space and surfaces such as clipboards, white boards and office walls in a way that constantly informs and inspires their design work.

Buzzispace provides the multimodality for spaces that convey information through multiple senses that facilitate rich communications between designers and design thinkers. Additionally, we need to find ways to display design artifacts that are indicative of different phases of the innovation process, the current state and the future state. They serve as reminders and inspirations.

In search for our design solution, Idea Couture is working with a super cool Belgium-based company called Buzzispace, a young Belgium design group with big ambitions, and like Idea Couture, they are being recognized as a 'creative think tank'. Their ideas can be described in three simple words: Ecology, Acoustics and Flexibility. Their designs are winning awards across Europe including the Brussels Design Award for Best Belgian Product for 'Buzzizone' - an acoustic, half high, freestanding wall.

The beauty of the Buzzizone (free standing wall) deisgn is that they are all produced from recycled and recyclable materials. Fit nicely with Idea Couture's sustainability needs. You will be seeing a lot of grey, pink and green in our SF office. Their products are upcycled again and again, and the biodegradable cardboard structure inside can be returned to nature after its use, completley saitisfy the 'cradle to cradle' philosophy.

For chairs, it has to be Herman Miller. The company is known for its highly functional, sustainable, environmentally friendly products that marry functional, beautiful design with high standards for recyclability and minimal waste. The Mirra chair is what we are using across all offices. It is a Cradle-to-Cradle Gold and Silver certified by McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), the global sustainability certification firm.

For us, the work space is important. Not that it needs to be cool and stylish, it reflects the company culture, or the smell of the place. Sustainability is a key criteria. Creative spaces are more than just space to brainstorm or a random unification of desks. They are places where innovation happens, experience is being designed, economy is being produced, and new industry are being created. Our design thinkers search for ways to create innovation, our spaces should be a haven for people with ideas. They should act as idea laboratories where people can experiment with new processes of developing and implementing ideas. There is no need for water coolers.

I hate cubicles. Wonder who invented cubicles? It is the worst thing that ever happened to the modern corporation. I believed several decades ago modernist architects/designers saw walls and rooms as downright fascist and wanted change. The spaciousness and flexibility of an open plan would liberate office workers. But corporations took up their ideas differently and used it as means to save costs and pack as many as possible into a space. It eventually became the assembly line equivalent for the white collar.

Cubicles were then invented when interior designers attempted to save it from becoming a white collar factory. In the 1950s Quickborner, a German design group broke up the rows of desks into more organic groupings with partitions for privacy—what it called the Bürolandschaft, or “office landscape”. In 1968 Herman Miller began selling its system as modular systems, the unfortunate consequence is when people cherry-pick the space-saving aspects of these designs and leave out the humanizing touches which is part of the original concept. And when the low cost manufatuers tried to copy the idea and it became a disaster.

Funny enough, there is actually a children cubicle for sale: a baby's first cubicle is one of the most depressing toys ever designed. But having people to switch to the open office is not easy either. One question often surfaces is the benefit of open offices, can you actually make decisions quicker and more efficiently when information are easily shared in an open space working environment? My experience with this is sometimes it takes a little longer for people to adjust to the open space working concepts where people easily overheard conversations. Co-ordination is improved as a result of that and the result is usually better individual and collective decisions.

Elizabeth Gould, Professor of Psychology at Princeton, was working on research attempt to defy the dogma of her field and proved that the primate brain creates new cells, she has gone on to demonstrate that the structure of the brain is incredibly influenced by one's surroundings. The key to Gould's demonstration of neurogenesis was the stimulating environment. Cages stopped neurgenesis, which she describes as "The neurons stop investing in them." It means cubicles can kill new brain cells production and as a result stiffens creativity. And the dull, boring, unstimulating cube life is creating stress for the brain.

I suggest we should have health warning attached to every single cubicle reading “WARNING: Cubicle kill new brain cells” or “The Ministry of Health warns: Use of cubicle decreases creativity”.

August 04, 2010

Social enterprise is a hot idea. Being asocial entrepreneurship these days is way cooler than being a iBanker. I think we are only seeing the beginning of a long term trend, people realize it takes a new kind of enterprise to solve the world’s problem. And NGOs are not the solutions. Getting donations and acting as administrators are not adding enough value. They need to start thinking how to create value – here comes social enterprises.

We don't have a good definition of what is considered a social enterprise. Are they in the business of making money or a new kind of “non-profit?” Or “not-just-for-profit" company with a double or triple bottom-line? What’s the percentage of profit that they should retain in order to claim or to qualify as a social enterprise?

More questions: Who should be funding them and what is an acceptable rate of return? What kind of retained profit should they keep? Should they use the money to grow the business or given them out for social good (at the expense of the future growth of the enterprise)? What kind of social value must the enterprise create to be considered “social”? Is green considered “social”? Is healthcare in developed countries “social”?

Creating a start-up is hard enough? Creating a start-up with a social mission is harder? Creating a start-up that is profitable is not easy? And worrying about generating too much profit is an additional challenge. So what is the priority of a social enterprise?
Should social enterprises be pushing for more efficiencies and economies of scale the same way as corporations do today? In that case, at what point it is at the expense of social good? All these questions warrant a lot of debates, no easy answers.

Social enterprises require creativity, passion, commitment and the right
combination of investments and talents. I've seen a few interesting ideas from students' competition and here is one that I like.

MaloTraders: Founded by Temple University student Mohamed Ali Niang, MaloTraders' is in the business of processing, storing, and marketing of rice for small-scale farmers in Mali. By making local production more competitive on the international market, MaloTrade is working to alleviate poverty.
Malo Traders’ social mission is to alleviate poverty, combat food insecurity, and eradicate malnutrition in Mali.

They aim to accomplish their social mission by minimizing post-harvest losses of small-scale farmers utilizing modern technology, increasing profits of harvests by creating an efficient rice value chain, and fortifying rice with micronutrients such as vitamin A, iron, zinc, and folic acid. The plan is to create the first brand of Malian rice and adhere to international export quality standards. A social brand for rice, that’s a good idea.

July 11, 2010

Here is our summer collection. Everybody like these. I guess the message is cool. I get people coming up and ask me where did I get those. Rethinking management and leadership - one innovation that is less talked about is “Leadership and Management Innovation”, OK what does it mean?

Management practices have always circled around a narrow view of Return on Capital and that drives many of the key business decisions. Optimization of profits, financial capital and assets are an important part of executing a business strategy, but have we thought about how to innovate “leadership and management” itself. I mean new thinking around business strategy that provides additional bottom lines beyond just financial. Where money, purpose and systems are aligned.

Any CEOs who are only interested in maximizing short-term profits or trading hedge funds and companies are not the one that can steward organizations to a healthy and sustainable future. So what do we mean? Here are some examples.

There are cases of CEOs who have broken away from the norm of the “classical, narrow view of what investor accountability which is suffering from QRB (quarterly returns obsession). What they have been doing in innovating the very core of leadership and management and rethink the role of it. Here are some examples:

Founder and exCEO of Nike, Phil Knight, who responded to global protests by overhauling the company’s labor standards and then lobbied for other firms to be held to the same standards; Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, who sought to convince shareholders that legislation capping US carbon emissions is a smart business move; and Yvon Chouinard, founder and CEO of Patagonia who was the first to pledge 1% of annual sales to grassroots environmental organizations and the first major retail company to switch all its cotton clothing over to organic, the first to make fleece from recycled soda-pop bottles.

Each of these business leaders broke the rules of what their own organizations would have considered the right thing to do, and is not only profits, profits and profits. Leadership requires building a culture of “Integrity”, creating a brand with “Authenticity”, reinforcing purposes and values through “Communities”, encourage the organization’s decision-making style for “Transparency” and making sure key resource decisions need to consider “Sustainability” beyond just environmental.

Management needs to innovate itself the very idea of management and leadership. CEOs have larger responsibilities, not only creating a viable future for the organizations and return for shareholders; they need to be change makers of our future societies. Real change will not come from governments; it will be the multinationals that possess the power. My observation is that that the biggest constraints that business leaders facing are their “inability to value new types of “competitive advantage” and the true power of “sustainability” embedded in business strategy making.

Government and NGOs can advocate our social problems, clean water, climate change or obesity or women empowerment etc, but top business leaders are having a hard time interpreting, sense-making, translating them into business strategies, One day we wake up and realize “Sustainability has become the new Capitalism.”

On a different note, MIT Global Challenge is a wonderful idea towards solving many of our problems. In 2011 the global MIT community will be invited to celebrate the 150th anniversary of a world-changing institution. In the spirit of celebration, innovation and service, the MIT Global Challenge is launching a competition to involve the MIT community worldwide in innovative, multidisciplinary problem solving, reconnecting alumni with the spirit of invention and enterprise that pervades the Institute.
Idea Couture is proud to be a partner to design and develop the platform which is an unique online space through where people can engage in an ongoing, interactive process to identify problems, propose solutions, reward the most innovative and workable ideas, and document experiences as the winning ideas are implemented in communities around the world. Our team is very excited to be on this project.

There are no shortage of global challenges. Some are really complex. For example, the inequality of the distribution of natural resources on the planet, especially of energy, gives rise to powerful structural tensions within the systems that try to resolve the problem locally with uncivilized methods.

Another example is business as such. The obvious globalization of worldwide production all the more powerfully enters into conflict with the national character of political activity, when business in the lawless space of an international muddle acquires the forms of earlier, wild capitalism with all the terrible consequences for society and the environment. But the attempts of some public movements to stop the globalization of money flows are waste of effort: no one has the least chance of successfully resisting the laws of economic development. These are no simple challenge that simply throwing money at it can solve the problem or creating a new policy. It truly requires innovative thinking. Probably too much for the sunny weekend.

I am pleased to officially announce that Idea Couture is the proud sponsor of TED 2010 Toronto. We’re looking forward to connect with others in this exciting event. Expecting to see many cool people.

Off to the arrport to SF for a a few days. Back-to-back meetings but looking forward to meet up with old friends and colleagues.

June 03, 2010

I was speaking a keynote yesterday at an Innovation Camp. It was great place to share our stories and our journey to make innovation a ‘business’ discipline. I showed the audience the path to innovation is never a logical one. The fuzziness goes beyond the front end and extends into the late stage and innovation involves more than just design, it requires selling, positioning and marketing.

Innovation is more than just product design and even more than business strategy. If you think about it today, we are in such as mess… healthcare, financial, technology, media, geopolitics, sustainability etc…. and think if innovation is about figuring out what those problems mean to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating.

In a few short months, Idea Couture will be celebrating another anniversary year with many happy clients, and some people have been here for three years. We are adding new people every month and some are spreading across different geographies (SF and India are next), it will be harder for everyone to know everyone and no one likes that.

I have been lucky (by design) consistently finding the brightest and most creative people to join the IC family. I will NOT settle for less. My time is too valuable to spend on people who don’t the potential and motivated to become the best. I’ve heard a few times from some my staff that my standard is too high …. both on research, design and strategy. But that’s the way it is and will always be. My job is to ensure we have the most rigor innovation process (from insight gathering to opportunity mapping to design /prototyping) and our outputs supersede the best in the industry. I don’t make compromise.

When Idea Couture was founded, it was based on a few premises 1/ we need both analytical thinking as well as creative thinking to solve wicked problems for our clients 2/ we need to develop a set of robust tools as part of our innovation process 3/ we need to bring user into the process as early and as often as possible, call it participative design.

I never stress enough the importance of combing D-School and B-School thinking (our TM slogan) and believe that they are crucial to innovation management. Today's management concepts that are taught in B-schools are heavily based on "optimization" and "scale economics" and the fact that businesses need to make better use of resources and exercise their power in order to gain competitive advantage. However, this suggestion does not address “size” and can create other problems including legacies and bureaucracy that may hinder imagination and opportunities. I believe that the next generation of design thinkers can effectively use both sides of their brains to produce a winning combination and in turn move knowledge forward.

There are three people (visionary or gurus) who were early advocate of similar thinking beyond just academic debate but in a highly practical sense and probably positively influenced many people in business and design:

Tom Peters, 68-year old management consultant turned author/speaker/guru started more than 10 years ago telling executives the importance of innovation (beyond traditional technological definition) and how companies should “strive for strangeness and he as an early advocate of the "culture of prototyping." One interesting quote from Peter is "The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to 'tidy up' the mess, as opposed to understand it's a 'day one' issue and part of everything.

Patrick Whitney, a 54-year-old Canadian native who is Dean of the IIT (Institute of Design in Chicago), the largest graduate school of design in the US. Whitney is a visionary leading a new movement to modernize and professionalize the discipline of design/innovation that is closer to the real business world. Whitney is turning design into a core methodology of innovation and is integrating the best of business and design thinking, taking away the airy-fairly from idea generation brain-storming. This is a big unfilled gap for many organizations and will continued to be one.

Well the third one is Bruce Nussbaum (ex Business Week innovation and design editor). He is now professor of Innovation and Design at the Parsons School for Design and I am sure most of you know him. He is not a designer or consultant. He is credited with bringing innovation and design to mainstream and an early advocate to suggest designers to take the lead in the transformation. Design has become very much an innovation industry. He is not just talking about the design of one product, but the design of the whole process of innovation in a company. Designers are thinking of themselves more as consultants and moving into what traditionally has been a management consulting function, providing "tutoring" on innovation as well as product design.

May 06, 2010

It has not been a productive week since I have been dealing with some health issues, unfortunately I still have so much work to take care of. While meeting with the doctor, I never stop consulting even if I am sick, I was giving him a few business and management tips, he has a lot of business interest outside of his medical practice. In return, hope to get a few tips about my health situation. I shared with him the 3Ps of business: The Peanut Effect, The Penis Theory and The Perfectionist Syndrome.

First is the Peanut Effect – One main reason why so many people play the lottery is that they place disproportionate weight on small probabilities, as specified by many generalized expected utility theories (you can ignore these economic explanation). People don’t realize the true cost of a lottery ticket as a “peanut” not realizing how costs add up over time. The same can be applied to buying snacks and other small expenditures.

What you can learn from is if you are marketing your product or services, you should find a way to emphasize some big benefits although possibilities for that to happen is small. The credit cards are doing a decent job of selling benefits (lost item protection etc.) that have very small chance of happening.

Second is the Penis Theory - Penis envy in Freudian psychoanalysis refers to the theorized reaction of a girl during her psychosexual development to the realization that she does not have a penis. Freud considered this realization a defining moment in the development of gender and sexual identity for women. In contemporary culture, the term is sometimes used metaphorically to refer to women who wish they had a penis. And you don't need one to succeed in business.

What you can learn from here is that too many marketers are spending too much time trying to be someone else. How often companies claimed they wanted to be Apple, Amazon, Google or Toyota (not anymore)? By spending too much time and resources trying to be someone else, it is more productive to understand who you really are. What’s your raison d'être?

Third is the Perfectionist Syndrome – I came across many high performers who are perfectionist, but not a true sense because when you look at their work, they are too afraid to make calculated mistakes. And as a result, they often reach a performance ceiling. Perfectionism muffles our ability to hear, listen and learn.

What you can lean from this is that perfectionism is impossible. We're all imperfect in some ways. The question is how to be strategically imperfect. Give yourself the permission to stop pursuing perfection. The best works I’ve seen are far from perfect; they are great platform for change, inspirations to create meaningful differentiation and roadmaps to help organizations to get to the future. These do not need to be perfect.